by Shandi Boyes
As Smith mimics the panicked voice of an officer in the middle of a furious gun battle, I shift my eyes to Lucy. It’s stupid of me to do. All I can see in her big blue eyes is Fien in a couple of years. It has me convinced the carnage will never end. Whether right now or twenty years in the future, I will forever fight to keep my daughter safe. I just want the privilege of showing her how I’d go to the end of the world for her.
I also want to do the same for Roxanne. She put her life on the line for my daughter, and now she and our unborn child are at risk. I won’t see her go through what Audrey did. I don’t care what it takes, I will stop it before it has the chance to transpire. I’ll keep her safe as I failed to do my wife. Then maybe, just maybe, the guilt I’ve felt the past two years will finally slacken enough I can secure an entire breath.
“I’m sorry, Luce,” I whisper in a low, dull tone, the angst eating me alive too strong to discount.
My apology is barely audible, but the weight it lifts from my chest is phenomenal. It makes my steps to my car quick and buoyant like Lucy will forgive me as quickly as I’m hoping Alice will.
My lengthy strides freeze mid-pump when the faint voice of Lucy trickles into my ears not even a few seconds later. She called my name, undeserving salutation and all. It has me spinning to face her even faster than she dashes across the pavers lining the poolside to gather up her iPad she was mesmerized by when I arrived.
For the way her chubby cheeks bounce when she stops to stand in front of me, her words shouldn’t be anywhere near as mature as they are. “Daddy always said it’s too late to say you’re sorry once you’ve done bad, but Mommy and I don’t agree.” Her lips quiver as she confesses, “She hasn’t stopped crying all morning. She said it was because she was excited to see me after my sleepover. I didn’t believe her. Look, she was even crying when she read me a bedtime story.”
She twists her iPad around to show me a screenshot dated a little after eight last night. It doesn’t just show Alice’s tear-stained face as she endeavors to put on a brave front for her daughter, it features Lucy’s screen as well. Since she is holding her device far away from her face, several identifiable markers are seen behind her.
As it dawns on me what she’s showing me, Lucy pushes her iPad into my hand, smiles in a way that reveals I’m still in her shit book, then she skips back to her mother’s side.
I stare at her in awe for the next several minutes, stunned as fuck. If I hadn’t spared her mother’s life, I guarantee she wouldn’t have shared this information with me. She’s only doing it because she knows how this industry works. If she scratches my back, hers will never be itchy. She’s a mastermind in the making, and she’s only eight.
God save anyone who does her wrong when she reaches her prime.
Although the drone of a single police siren has been temporarily diverted, no amount of manipulation can alter the buzz of half a dozen. They’re even howling above our heads, the big guns brought in for the sake of one of their own.
While a police helicopter circles above us, Rocco slides into the driver’s seat of my car before firing up the ignition. I don’t put up a protest. Not only does he drive faster and better than me, the change-up will give me time to peruse the image Lucy showed me.
“Can you see this?” I raise my voice to ensure Smith can hear me over the ruckus attempting to follow us out of Alice’s gated community.
“Spikes on entry ramp 43, take Makers,” Smith advises Rocco before shifting his focus to me. “I’m stripping Lucy’s ‘find my phone’ app to trace the location the photo was taken from, but it would be quicker if you zoomed in.”
My tailor-made pants slide across the leather interior of my car when Rocco takes Makers like a bat out of hell. We get airborne for a second, which increases the width of Rocco’s grin.
Once our tires grip the asphalt, I get back to business. “On what?”
“Right on Lark.” Smith’s fingers tap out a million words a minute before he responds, “Top left. It appears to be some type of emblem. I’m certain I’ve seen it before.”
As Rocco loses the last police cruiser tailing us by plowing through an intersection at a speed well above the designated signage, I double tap on the screen of Lucy’s iPad. I don’t need to angle it to ensure Smith gets a clear view of the poster in the camera hidden in my rearview mirror. I already know who it belongs to. It’s a poster-size flyer of the ones I handed out the night of Ophelia’s accident. The flyers Ophelia designed knowing our father would be more arrogant in front of an audience. He isn’t one of those men who rain sunshine down on his family in front of others to portray the ideal husband and father. He preferred degrading us. Blood or not, if he could stand on you to make himself feel an inch taller, he would.
He still does.
With my jaw tight with annoyance, my voice is huskier than normal. “Have Clover meet us at the tunnel. We need to weapon-up before moving in.” While Smith hums out an agreeing noise, I switch my eyes to Rocco. “We need to dump and burn.”
He flashes me a cocky wink. “Already reported her as stolen.” When I give him a look as if to ask when he had time to do that, he rubs his hands together like we’re not sailing down the road at a speed well above the designated limit. “We all have our secrets, D. Even me.”
If it were any day but today, I’d torture his secrets out of him. Since it isn’t, they’ll have to stay on the backburner. I want to finish my day strong, not burden it down with more stress.
5
Dimitri
With the eyes of a dozen bloodthirsty men on me, I say, “The warehouse we’re about to storm was once a Petretti stronghold. It isn’t anymore. We would be fools to walk in blind.”
Even while juggling a laptop like a circus clown, Smith jumps into the conversation with no hesitation in his voice. “We heat-scanned the warehouse. Readings are coming back with the imagery of a single occupant. Height, weight, and core body temperature reveals the target is most likely female—”
“Or he’ll be wishing he was by the time we’re done with him,” Rocco interrupts, laughing. Humor is his go-to when he’s feeling overwhelmed.
“She is also breathing.”
I’m reasonably sure Smith’s pause is to give me time to absorb the good in what he’s saying, that Roxanne is alive and well. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t lessen my itch to kill. I’m fired up and ready to go, only delayed by making sure the men about to follow me to battle know what they’re fighting for.
They won’t come out of today with a legacy. They will only be awarded my respect.
To some, that’s as worthless as a piece of paper.
To me, it’s the most valuable thing I own.
Smith’s next set of words gobble up the last of the laughter from Rocco’s witty comment. “The fact only one occupant has been noted should concern you. This is most likely an ambush.”
He brings up imagery of the terrain surrounding the warehouse. Because it’s an old industrial area that pumped out as much steel as drugs in the seventies, it is swamped by similar-sized buildings.
“As per Dimitri’s request…” don’t misconstrue Rocco’s nicely worded statement, he’s beyond pissed about my ‘request,’ “… while he enters the main warehouse from the front entrance like a sitting fucking duck…” he murmurs his last five words, “… we are to search the buildings on each side of it.”
Eager to get back to the operation I’m helming, I add, “Smith has deployed drones. They will jam all signals, including ours. This isn’t a seek-orders mission. If you must kill or be killed, always choose the former. If we can’t get information out of them, we will find a way of getting it out of their corpse.”
Needing to get things moving since we lost hours waiting for Smith to work his magic, I throw open the door of the van we’re camped out in before making my way to the road’s edge. Since we’re back a good distance from the warehouse holding one occupant, I have to shield my eyes from the low-hanging sun to take i
t in.
I want to say my stare-down weakens the knot in my stomach, but that would be a lie. Smith wasn’t deceitful when he said this is an ambush. My enemies are waiting for me to fall, but since I refuse to continue taking it up the ass as I have the past two years, I’m rewriting the rules. It could get myself killed, but just like I’ll never be a hero, I won’t die a coward either.
“Let’s go. The sooner we know who’s in that warehouse, the better it will be for all involved.” You didn’t misread my tone. I’m doubtful the person holed up in the warehouse for the past two hours is Roxanne. An explosive personality like hers is felt for miles. Not even the slightest tickle is felt under my toes. My intuition is telling me I will get answers today. They just won’t be answers to the questions I want answered.
After waiting for Rocco to slip into the Range Rover behind me, I slide into the driver’s seat of the prototype vehicle we affectionally call The Tank. I’m not taking her for a spin because I’m afraid of a little bullet, I want to ensure if the warehouse doors are locked, I’ll have no issues going through them.
With our group on radio silence, I have to hand signal for my men to move. There’s an eeriness associated with our ghost-like approach. Hearing Smith’s breaths in my ear has been such the norm the past two years, the ones raging in my chest sound foreign.
One by one, the vehicles following me peel off until I’m the lone soldier on a bumpy gravel road. While shifting down the gears, bringing The Tank’s revs down to half of what they were, I scan my chest, anticipating the dots of a sniper’s rifle to be lighting it up.
Unease melds through my veins when not a single speck is found. My chest remains clear of any visible markings when I pull The Tank up to the side of the cracked-open door, and not a dot highlights any part of my body when I make my way into the dusty space with my gun held high and my wish to kill even higher than it.
I jackknife to my left when a familiar voice says, “Has Smith always been this pedantic with protocol? Or did he become this way after we parted ways?”
My grip on my gun tightens when the pretty hazel eyes of Special Agent Ellie Gould lock with mine. She smiles like I won’t kill her where she stands, unaware Smith has desired doing the same thing many times the past two years.
It isn’t every day you find out your girlfriend is a federal agent, so I won’t mention the fact he unearthed the truth while perusing tapes of her schmoozing with the enemy, or you might tempt me into killing her.
One less agent won’t hurt anyone, except perhaps Smith. From what I’ve been told, you don’t get over your first love. I’ve not yet had the chance to test the theory. That could change depending on the outcome of Ellie’s resurrection. As the saying goes, ‘stare at the dark so long, you’ll eventually see what isn’t there,’ it fails to mention what you’re striving not to see—a smile hidden under locks of bleached hair and a mascara-stained face. Nothing scares me, but the thought of never seeing them again is a nightmare I refuse to live.
I’ll burn down this entire fucking hellhole before I ever let Rimi Castro beat me again, and I’ll take Roxanne down with me because despite how many times I’ve told her otherwise, I want her. I want her more than anything, and I will have her. No fear.
6
Roxanne
“Out, now. This one is out of gas.”
The goon with thick biceps and a bad attitude doesn’t wait for me to respond, he just yanks on my arm until I fall out of the trunk of a light-colored sedan for the fourth time today. I had wondered if the churns of my stomach the past couple of hours were from hunger or fear. From the low hang of the sun, I’m confident it’s a bit of both.
I understand this is part of the plan, I’m playing my part of a kidnap victim well, but I’m also worried. We’ve been on the road for hours. I’ve not been given any water or food. Even my numerous kicks on the roof of the trunk advising I needed to pee went unanswered.
This man doesn’t care about me at all. It honestly seems as if my pregnancy is more an annoyance to him than an incentive for a big cash bonus. Every time I use it with the hope it will see him issuing leniency, he becomes more aggressive.
Take now, for example. I barely murmur about the pain tearing me in two from his brutal yank on my arm, yet he acts as if I asked him to purchase me a box of tampons. “Quit your grumbling. I told you we were in for a long trip.”
The briefest moment of reprieve smacks into me when he tosses open the front passenger door of a truck parked in the middle of a road to nowhere. He has to be working with someone because cars aren’t left in the middle of the boonies waiting to be hotwired. He drives each vehicle until the gas tank hits E, then we swap rides. That reveals our trip was methodically planned. It just seems as if my being pregnant didn’t factor into the equation.
“Can I please have some water?” I ask half a mile down the dusty road.
The stranger with gleaming black eyes peers at me over the bottle he’s guzzling down like he hasn’t had a drink in hours before he shakes his head. The brutal crossing of my arms seems to humor him as much as my stink eye.
Although pissed he finds my dehydration entertaining, I’m glad it also sees him switching things up. “All right, I’m sure I can spare a couple of drops.”
His tone already has me on the back foot, let alone the way he swishes the water around his mouth before he tilts his head to my side of the cabin.
“Open up,” he talks through the slop in his mouth.
He almost chokes on the water he’s gargling in the back of his throat when my eagerness to get away from him has my arm getting cozy with the steel panel of the door. It isn’t just tender like every other region of my body. It’s also bleeding.
What the hell?
As my head rolls through snippets of my first drugging, my hand shoots up to caress the implant site where Smith placed my tracker. It feels like the world closes in on me when my probing fingers fail to discover anything but a wound that appears to have been inflicted hours ago.
There’s no bead-size device.
No implant.
Nothing.
I’m all alone, and Dimitri isn’t one step behind me.
Fuck.
With my plan gone to shit, my mood soon follows it, but I refuse to walk into my death without a fight. I’ll give as good as I’m getting. The odds aren’t in my favor. My captive has a gun, and I’ve got nothing but determination, but I’ve fought with less for longer. My entire life has been a battle I was never meant to win, yet here I am, pregnant to the man I love and willing to do anything to ensure he sees his child’s every milestone.
First smile.
First word.
First step.
I want Dimitri and his daughter to witness it all.
With that in mind, I batten down the hatches and settle in. The storm we created is coming. I can smell the rain on the horizon, feel the coolness of its imminent arrival in the air. It will be a beauty. I’ve just got to survive its wrath. If I do that, I’ll have more than a rainbow to look forward to. I’ll have the entire world at my feet.
7
Dimitri
“I don’t work for the Feds. I use them when it works in my favor.”
Acting as if my tone doesn’t hold half the fury it does, Ellie moves to my side of the warehouse. My entire crew is here, including Smith, so I not only have to be conscious of what I say, I can’t slit Ellie’s throat to stop her speaking the insolent words she’s been spurting the past forty minutes.
“We’re chasing the same men, Dimitri. That puts us on the same team.”
I laugh in her face. Both its pitch and length reveals how agitated I am. Out of all the days the Feds could reach out for my help, they chose today. I’m running out of time. Roxanne has been gone for hours. I don’t even know if she’s alive anymore, but I should stop my search because a ‘friend’ of Ellie’s needs my contacts.
“I. Don’t. Work. For. The. Feds.” I speak extra slow, ensuring there’s
no way she can miss the fury in my tone this time around. “And if I need to tell you again, not even Smith will be able to save you. Do you understand me?”
Like a woman without a wish to live, she undoes the cuffs on her belt, unlocks them with a flick of her wrist, then brings them to within an inch of my hand. “Don’t make me do this, Dimitri. I don’t want to force your help, but if you leave me no choice, I will. This is a matter of national security. It ranks higher than your wish for revenge.”
Wish for revenge? That snaps my last nerve.
After signaling for Clover to put Smith in lockdown, I grip Ellie’s throat with everything I have. She struggles in an instant, her hands scratching at mine as her eyes bulge. A wish to live is seen all over her face when my brutal hold lifts her feet from the ground. It’s almost as bright as the gleam on Smith’s face as he fights against both Rocco and Clover to get to me.
He wants to kill me. I don’t blame him. I’d do the same in his situation. Alas, I’m fighting for more than my girl right now. My entire existence is on the line.
“You enter my turf, waste my time, then threaten to arrest me. I should have killed you before Smith laid his eyes on you, then I would have gotten away with your murder without losing a valued member of my team. Now I might have to kill you both.”
For the first time this afternoon, fright registers on Ellie’s face. She’s fearless when it comes to dying, but she doesn’t feel the same way when Smith’s life is on the line with hers.
“This also isn’t a wish for revenge. If you weren’t fucking the enemy, you’d know that.” My last sentence calms Smith down. Not a lot, but it’s better than nothing. “This goes way deeper than that.”